Coach’s Counsel: Keep it fun and exciting, but under control

by Scott Boye, Friday Harbor
For years I coached a High School sailing team. The experience gave me many insights that seem random but taken in their totality have led me to one conclusion: for kids to enjoy sailing you have to make it fun.

Whether it’s sailing or another sport, it’s no fun to get crushed in a game. The losing team reaches a point where they are just going through the motions, and the winning team realizes at some point that humiliating the losers really isn’t that fun either. A close game is more exciting for both teams and for the spectators.

Years ago I had a very talented sailor on the high school sailing team. We practiced three-on-three team racing extensively because that is one of the three National Championships that the Interscholastic Sailing Association holds. My talented sailor took to team racing quickly. He started to control the fleet, bringing 1, 2, 3 finishes to our team regularly. At one dual match with another school, his domination brought about a complete meltdown of the opposing team. Halfway through the race, the opposing team just sailed off the racecourse and went back to the dock.

This school had had it with being abused by my sailor. I proposed to this sailor that he’s good enough to get crushing wins, but to really show his mastery I asked that he try and win team races by just one point. This had the effect of my sailor constantly thinking about how to just barely win the race and not humiliate the other team. It made him a better team racing sailor and other teams didn’t feel degraded.

While we would regularly practice the classic Windward/Leeward races, I found that it could get pretty boring. I came up with essentially a waterborne version of Ultimate Frisbee using a sponge in place of the disc. Normal racing rules applied; you had to bring your boat to a complete stop while in possession of the sponge and we would switch ends of the ‘field’ so the loser of the previous point had starboard advantage. The kids love it; they got rules experience and boathandling skills were honed to a knife edge. All while ‘not racing’.

From a safety standpoint, racing does keep all the boats in a relatively small area. It’s a nice concept to give the sailors their freedom and let them go wherever they like, but at least where I’m from, that means that they can spread out over a large area and it can take 10-15 minutes to go from one side of the fleet to the other. With racing, the fleet is compact; I can watch to see who’s doing well and who’s in trouble. My prime directive is to bring back the same number of sailors that I left the dock with. Everything else is secondary. And racing helps me keep them corralled so I can better watch them.